And in contrast to pop-culture portrayals of theoretical physicists — solitarily scribbling away on blackboards, enveloped in clouds of chalk mud — Dr. Massey likes working with individuals. In flip, individuals regard him extremely sufficient to talk his title in the proper rooms. He wraps up one mission, and it isn’t lengthy earlier than one other drops in his lap. He additionally tends to inherit organizations in want of some route — most lately the Big Magellan, which faces monetary turmoil.
Dr. Massey’s involvement with the telescope mission got here towards the top of a presidency on the Faculty of the Artwork Institute of Chicago. Throughout a board assembly for the Woods Gap Marine Organic Laboratory in Massachusetts, Robert Zimmer, then the president of the College of Chicago, approached him about serving on the Big Magellan’s board. One yr later, Dr. Massey was elected chair.
However amongst all of his posts and accolades, one stands out, Dr. Massey stated. In 1995, he assumed the presidency of his alma mater, Morehouse Faculty, a traditionally Black males’s faculty in Atlanta and the positioning of Dr. King’s funeral. “With out Morehouse,” he stated, “I simply wouldn’t be who I’m.”
Torn Between Worlds
Dr. Massey grew up in Hattiesburg, Miss., in the course of the peak of segregation. In the event you had been Black, he recalled, you sat within the balcony at motion pictures, rode buses within the again and slipped by way of the facet entrances of shops — if you happen to may store there in any respect. And when a white individual was on the sidewalk, you moved out of the way in which.
Determined to go away, he was elated when, at 16, he received a scholarship to attend Morehouse. However he rapidly realized that his classmates appeared down on individuals from Mississippi. “And so I stated, ‘I’ll present them,’” Dr. Massey stated. “What’s the toughest course?” He selected physics as a result of he felt he had one thing to show.
Throughout a consortium of 4 schools, he was the one scholar in his yr learning physics. However he was by no means lonely. Quite the opposite, he beloved getting misplaced in equations. Years later, in his memoir, Dr. Massey described a “whole absorption that’s as near a meditative state as I’ve ever achieved.”
He rode that keenness right into a doctoral program at Washington College in St. Louis, the place he studied how liquid helium behaved close to absolute zero levels. In 1966, he earned his Ph.D., becoming a member of a cohort of greater than a dozen Black physicists throughout the nation who had achieved the identical feat.
Quickly after, Dr. Massey moved to Chicago to work on the close by Argonne Nationwide Laboratory, learning the unusual conduct of sound waves in superfluid helium, which appeared to defy the legal guidelines of physics. His work caught the eye of researchers at Urbana-Champaign in addition to Anthony Leggett, a theorist on the College of Sussex in England whose understanding of helium would later win him a Nobel Prize in Physics.
